Graduate Programmes

In recent years, technology has played a far more disruptive role in our firm and changed the way we deliver legal services. The speed of evolution in this area has increased dramatically in the last 12 months. In diverse fields such as AI, data extraction, data visualisation and rules-based analysis, technology is creating new ways for our clients to solve problems.

While studying Human, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge I also joined my College's Law Society to investigate whether a legal career would best suit me. During my time with the society, I attended numerous dinners and events with various law firms. Soon after, I jumped at the opportunity to apply for the position at Allen & Overy and to explore a variety of career paths within the legal industry. Initially starting as a Legal Project Assistant, I then joined the Advanced Delivery Programme. I’ve found it has been really beneficial to receive the same training as the legal trainees, which has ranged from understanding finance, developing client value propositions to story-telling and presentation skills. The presentation skills training certainly came in valuable, as I recently presented on using the Kira system for mergers and acquisitions at the Corporate Academy, which had 50 attendees from clients in 10 different countries. I also recently ran a session with one of A&O’s key Life Sciences clients on AI and Data Extraction. This was a great way to gain insight into the core challenges that our clients are facing and present to them technologies that could help based on our experience. I have also had the opportunity to travel to New York for Fuse U.S. Week, which was an intensive, but fantastic experience. I really enjoyed working with the New York team, and had great exposure to A&O’s key banking clients. The week really opened my eyes to the internal everyday challenges for in-house legal teams.

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The Project Management Office provides legal project management tools, training and support to our lawyers, enhancing the delivery of our legal work and setting us apart from our competitors. Supporting us on our most complex matters, the PMO is an essential resource that makes change possible.

I started the Advanced Delivery Graduate Programme in September 2018 and I am spending my first year with A&O’s Legal Project Management Team. I studied an LLB at the University of Liverpool followed by an MSc in Law & Finance at the University of Oxford. During my masters, I became increasingly interested in the innovative developments in working practices that were occurring in the legal profession. The Advanced Delivery Programme at A&O was the perfect fit for me, as it is the first scheme of its kind to offer graduates opportunities in the growing areas of Legal Technology and Project Management while at the same time offering the same standard of training as trainees on the traditional training contract, which includes a course on Financial Economics and other training modules in the Professional Skills Course. The programme puts you at the coalface of change in the legal profession by placing you alongside the leading innovators in the development of new technological solutions. Unlike a traditional training contract, the programme allows you to sit across all the practice groups in A&O. I may begin the day managing multiple jurisdictions involved in a property transaction and end the day directly advising a client on how best to manage the workstreams and budget of a Brexit related matter. If you thrive when face with variety and complex problems then I would really encourage you to apply to the scheme.

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The Markets Innovation Group (MIG) is one of the firm's newest practice areas and focuses on developing specific legal solutions for clients using new technology, drawing where necessary on other aspects of the firm's Advanced Delivery products and services.

Our clients are experiencing large-scale legal and regulatory challenges at an unprecedented level, and we are determined to lead from the front. MIG is a dedicated team of A&O employees which develops solutions for our clients’ large-scale legal and regulatory challenges.

To date, MIG has brought six leading tech-based solutions to market. Each of these was accompanied by an A&O-led industry working group operating out of Europe, the U.S. and/or APAC. To find out more about our Markets Innovation Group programme, click here.

I was drawn to the Markets and Innovation Group (MIG) precisely because of the work they do. The team is made up of ICM and Banking lawyers who are subject matter experts in both areas of legal technology and the law. The members of MIG therefore have a dual role: to imagine and develop market-leading legaltech tools for A&O’s clients and to support these clients every step of the way with high-quality legal expertise. This duality has not only allowed me to hone my legaltech skills, building on the strong foundation I received whilst working with the legaltech team; but has also allowed me to develop my legal transactional knowledge and learn from some of the best lawyers in the industry.

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Data populations associated with litigation, arbitration and investigation matters are getting more complex and growing in volume. To enable our lawyers to make informed and rapid legal decisions, we have embedded legal technology solutions directly into our working practices in order to better help us interrogate structured, semi-structured and unstructured data sets related to our clients’ matters. To find out more about our e-Discovery, click here.

The future of litigation lies in technology and how we harness it in conjunction with legal expertise to meet the clients’ litigation challenges - striking the optimal balance between cost, risk and quality. A&O’s eDiscovery business is taking the first step in meeting this challenge by rolling out our combined legal and technology methodology - offering RelativityOne - to our clients across the globe.

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